Local Covid Info

 Few links for Local COVID Info:

JHU on Georgia: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/georgia

JHU/Arcgis on Forsyth County https://bao.arcgis.com/covid-19/jhu/county/13117.html

Data from State of Georgia DPH  https://dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report

Sugary Cereals and deceptive pricing

When you are walking thru Grocery aisle, you will see sweetest cereals with cheapest price.
I wanted to break it down for understanding.

You can find Nutrition facts from one of gluten free cereal from a leading brand below: (source: https://www.postconsumerbrands.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pebbles_CinnamonPebbles.pdf)

Now Let's break this down.
This cereal contents two sources of carbs: a) rice b) sugar. As per nutrition facts, every 30 gram of cereal has 10 gram sugar. Essentially when you buy 15 oz of cereal (425 grams), it has 5 oz (140 grams) of sugar. 

How does the pricing for this work? 

Walmart sells a 15 oz box of serial at $3.12.  That seem to indicate that 1 oz of cereal is $0.21 ($0.208).

But that is deceptive.  
Walmart sells Great Value cane sugar at price of $3.02 for 4 lb, which is 64 oz. Which means price of 1 oz of sugar is $0.047. 5 oz of sugar comes to $0.23 (mind you, I have not pickup corn syrup or non-cane sugar which may be even cheaper - post doesn't indicate which type of sugar they have used)

Essentially
At $3.12, you are purchasing 10 oz of serial and and $0.23 worth of sugar.
Your net cost of cereal is $2.89 for 10 oz of cereal (and  $0.23 for 5 oz of sugar). Essentially your cereals are costing $0.29 per oz (consisting of mostly rice).

Almost all cereal manufacturers are to blame for such products .While there is potentially no mechanism to make a gluten free cereal taste good - pumping it with sugar should not be the way to do it.

Google is mixing content in play store

Google is mixing content in play store. You can see review of Apocalypse Now in the screenshot.

New Google Voice app is here

https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updates-our-google-voice-apps/

OpenLiveWriter and addig images and modifying blogpost

 

Blogger uses Google Photo to store pictures.  If you do modify a post using OpenLiveWriter, it uploads brand new copy of the pictures into Google Photo.  This may create a mess as each update keeps adding pictures.

A work around is to post pictures to a different website and just embed links onto Blog.

Easiest way to find Delta skymiles redemptions

It becomes extremely hard to find out availablity of fight as well as miles required if you want to redeem your SkyMiles on Delta.

Here is a trick that may help.

In place of trying to search a round-trip, just look for one way trip and try to get a 5 week calendar ; that will allow you to see across several days with options (see ATL-> LAX below).

While this may not look like a great thing to start with: consider an airport that Delta may not be flying to at all or if you are trying to get a peak period ticketing: See ATL—>BOM below where the flights are not availalble for redumption for some days or price shoot up to about 3 times:

Starting to use Open Live Writer

My wish is to try and put a blog post every week. I was looking for a tool that can help me do this.  I remembered good old Microsoft Live Writer. First link from Google search shows up a refererence to tool built in 2009 (I am sure there is a newer version too).

It was the second link that caught my eye – OpenLiveWriter. Screenshots looked very similar to Microsoft’s version and soon realized that it is based of Microsof’t version.

Good for Microsoft, that it decided to open it up and let community drive it (rather than have the code just die).  May be Google can learn from it (I would love to get Picasa back).

New Google Voice?

It seems that a new Google Voice is coming https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/on-small-business/wp/2017/01/12/finallya-new-google-voice-is-coming/

SaneBox - Review of a service that may be able to clean your mailbox

SaneBox is a service that may be able to clean up mailbox (especially Yahoo whose spam filter is very week as of right now).

Once SaneBox is configured to connect to your Yahoo account, it goes over various mails (and you can train it to classify mails in specific ways).

For some reason SaneBox classified lot of spam as News and moved it into a folder called as SaneNews upfront. As I had lot of spam in my folder it seems overwhelming at first to go thru. My thought is that once you start using it, it becomes easier as you are only processing new delta emails.

While SaneBox requires a subscription to use, it probably should also build a monetnization based on advertisements. Yahoo seem to be putting in ads in empty SaneBox folders (they are empty to start with). Here is a snapshot of an ad it showed within Yahoo UI.

Here is a movie worth watching and spreading: